Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the EnvironmentAnthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate ChangeLiterature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts

Heather Houser is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications include Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia Univ. Press, 2014) and essays in American Literary History, American Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Fiction Studies, and Public Culture. Her current project, “Environmental Culture and the Infowhelm,” studies the aesthetics of information management in recent environmental literature and media.

Heather Houser; Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the EnvironmentAnthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate ChangeLiterature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. American Literature 1 September 2017; 89 (3): 637–640. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4160954

What does ecocriticism need? Three recent books spanning subfields of environmental literary study suggest it needs to negotiate the lived experiences of ecological disruption and the processes and institutions that shape those disruptions. Their approach is to read across myriad texts according to theme or potency. The studies by Adam Trexler, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Hubert Zapf fall, respectively, into the subfields of Anglophone climate fiction, Mexican American and Chicana/o fiction from the past century, and evolutionary literary studies. Though there are no thematic or archival ties that bind these monographs, they all participate in a shared project within ecocriticism: to detail the representational strategies that mediate person and process, whether that process be climate politics, (de)colonization, or biological and cultural transformation. This effort affiliates numerous ecocritical studies—Stacy Alaimo on “transcorporeality,” Lawrence Buell on “toxic discourse,” and Ursula Heise on the dialectic...